The Bronze King

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “I don’t feel special,” I said.

  “You are. I’m—” He jumped up and started pacing. “Accidental, you know? Marginal. Something like that. In everything, not just this. You know that band I’m in, playing guitar? They took me on because their lead man had to go to the West Coast with his parents, and I’d picked up enough to fill in on the electric guitar.”

  “They wouldn’t keep you if you weren’t good enough for them,” I said, “would they?”

  “Nope. But good enough for them isn’t particularly good, and besides that—it makes me hungry, playing that music. It makes me feel itchy and hungry, you know? I have to tank up on something to do it for very long at a time.”

  “Drugs?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing hard, don’t worry, you’re not in the clutches of a dope fiend. Grass, mostly.”

  “That’s probably what makes you hungry,” I said, “not one kind of music instead of another.”

  “Oh, what the hell do you know about it?” he snarled.

  I grabbed my school stuff. “I better go home.”

  “Wait a minute, wait! Don’t fly off the handle. God, are you touchy! Listen, I’m not trying to get you to feel sorry for me or anything. I mean, look how I live, it’s not so bad, right? But I’d like you to understand how it is.”

  “Great,” I said. “How is it?”

  Joel threw himself down on the couch again. “How it is, is lousy.”

  “Classical music,” I said, remembering how he’d looked listening to Paavo play. “The violin. You really love that.”

  He started pushing a glass ashtray around on the top of the coffee table. “It’s in the family, I guess.”

  “Well, who’s stopping you? This city must be full of the best teachers, and your parents are connected.”

  “That’s right. Listen, I started. I played when I was little because everybody around me played or sang or something. I have an older sister, did I tell you? She’s married, she teaches piano in one of the best music departments in the country. I mean, she’s not great, but she’s damn good. I used to do some playing with her, dubs and things. I studied with good people. I was coming along, not a genius or anything like that, but good, maybe better than good later on.

  “So here comes my baby brother and without any instrument at all he takes over. I mean, he just takes over. He used to potter around at that piano when he was four, five. We thought he’d be a composer, maybe, if not a pianist. Well, came the day he picked up a bow and started conducting some chamber music they were playing here, my father and some friends. Turned out we had a goddamn prodigy on our hands. His instrument is the orchestra—all the instruments, every one. He plays the players, or whatever it is that conductors do. It’s a mystery to me, believe me.”

  “So you quit?” I said. “You could play like that, like Paavo, and you just quit?”

  “Not like him, that’s what I’m saying! And no, I didn’t just quit. I lost interest, I practiced less and less. One day I stopped. By then I was fooling around with the electric guitar—I had to do something. They all think I rebelled against the classical mania here and that I was doing my music someplace else, a different way.”

  He stopped and looked down at his left hand, which he was rubbing again. “Well, actually my mother took it hard. She doesn’t like popular music much, especially the heavy amp stuff. She’d feel better, I think, if she knew it was like doodling to me, just fooling around to pass the time. But I can’t talk to her about it. I can’t talk to any of them.”

  I said, “I like a lot of popular stuff, myself.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “But it’s not the same.”

  I had sometimes missed not having brothers or sisters of my own, and I sometimes thought I wouldn’t mind having a more glamorous parent or two. This tale of Joel’s was kind of sobering.

  To tell the truth, though, I thought he was more silly than tragic. I mean, in his place I’d saw away on my fiddle with whatever scrap of talent I had and be happy as a clam, tucked warm and cozy in the bosom of my nice, intact, cultured, very comfortable family. Also it struck me as just a tiny bit selfish to be more hung up on this sad story of being only talented, not a genius, than on the possible eating of the whole entire world by the kraken.

  On the other hand, it could not be denied that Joel was a good-looking boy, and good-looking people are inclined to get stuck on themselves at one time or another, if not permanently. And I had to admit that he could probably wow the blazes out of everybody just by walking out on a concert stage with a violin tucked under his chin.

  It struck me, too, that for me to be jealous of his bond with Paavo through music (if there was one) in the face of the problem we all had on our hands, well, that was petty, too.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. I think I have a better handle on things now. From your point of view, I mean.”

  “I guess it sounds pretty narrow and egotistical,” he said. Which it did, so I said, “Well, a little.”

  He waved at the pictures on the wall.

  “Listen, everybody in this house is some kind of performer, and if you don’t think that’s a crash course in ego, let me tell you—”

  I said, “Sure you can tell me, but not now. It’s getting late, and I still have to get back across the park.”

  “You want me to come with you, in case of the Princes?”

  “No, that’s okay. Paavo said I can get home okay in daylight.”

  “Paavo said the Princes were too busy to come bother us this afternoon in the park,” he pointed out.

  “He’s being more careful now. Anyway, Joel, you did enough. I didn’t realize, about your hands, you know, not wanting to take any risks with them, being a musician yourself. You better soak the hurt one in hot water for a while. And maybe you could get cleaned up before your parents get home so you don’t scare them to death when they see you.”

  “I guess,” he said, walking me to the door. “Thanks for listening. It’s not stuff I can talk about with my family. They’d think I was accusing them of pressuring me, which they say they never did. They didn’t, either, not consciously, anyway. And to my musician-friends, it’s all old hat, they don’t want to hear it. It’s kind of nice to talk to somebody outside of all that.”

  Somebody totally without talents, I guess he meant. I said, “I may be a writer, myself.”

  “No kidding,” he said “Stories, or what? My sister thought she was going to be a writer for a while, but she gave it up for the piano.”

  I wasn’t about to admit any more about my writing to somebody I barely knew. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow, okay? In the planetarium park.”

  “You’re pretty gutsy, for a girl,” he said.

  7

  Mom’s Spy

  “TINA, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” my mother said.

  Bad luck. She’d come home early, and I was walking in pretty late, to tell the truth. And, it turned out, she had spoken to the doorman downstairs and found out I’d come in late the day before, too.

  And she’d noticed that my big framed map of the world was gone from my bedroom wall, along with some stuffed animals left over from when I was a lot younger. I’d been meaning to clear them out anyhow, the animals I mean, so I didn’t mind. But Mom was nervous. Maybe she thought I was selling my own stuff to finance some godawful habit.

  I have to say I envied Joel being able to lie so casually, even if only to the doorman in his building, saying I was from his school. Well, implying it, anyway. Myself, I am a lousy liar because I tend to forget what I’ve said by the time I have to repeat the lie or go on from there.

  So I don’t do it much. It seemed to me that this was one of those necessary times, though. I mean, my mother has told me often enough not to talk to strange men; all mothers say that, and they’ve got good reasons, too, as anybody knows who reads the papers. She would not be delighted to hear about Paavo.

  I said, “I was out with Megan.” />
  Mistake.

  Mom had called Megan’s mother. She had called Barbara’s mother. She had even called Margie Acton’s mother, and that was really pushing things.

  She sat on the sofa in the living room, my neat, intense mother with the beautiful mascara and the carefully polished nails, and she fixed me with a steely gaze that would have terrified the men she went out with if they’d ever seen it.

  “Tina,” she said, “you’d better tell me what’s going on. I’m on my own with you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep an eye open for your welfare like other parents. It means I have to do it for two, you understand? And I take that responsibility very seriously.”

  I thought for a minute I was in for the lecture about how she was not happy about being a working mother and not having as much time for me as she’d like but she’d get that fixed as soon as she could, if only a decent man would come into her life. I believe there was a time when divorced and working mothers didn’t lay things out exactly that clearly to their kids, and frankly I’d just as soon have gone that route, but I guess you get what you get.

  This was not, however, that lecture.

  “You weren’t with Megan or Barbara or Margie,” she said. “Is it possible that you were with Joel?”

  Wowf. I tried to keep my face still but my mom is nobody’s fool, let me tell you, no matter how silly she sounds simpering at some guy on the telephone. I could see she’d spotted something in my expression.

  “Joel who?” I said, stalling.

  “Joel Wechsler, of course.” Mom sat back and watched me. She fiddled with the string of baroque pearls she was wearing. They looked like plastic to me, and I’d said so once and we’d had some words about tact.

  I did not like her right now because I knew there was no way to turn off her concern, which I really appreciated when I needed it. This was not one of those times. This was a time when she could use that concern to spoil something that belonged to me, myself, alone.

  How in the heck did she know about Joel?

  She read my mind. “You were seen today,” she said. “Going up to Joel’s parents’ apartment.”

  God. Was my mother actually spying on me? Could one of her ex-boyfriends live in Joel’s building or something? Would one of them use me as an excuse to call her?

  “Well, somebody’s wrong, then,” I said, but I knew it was all doomed, the whole business.

  “I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Do you remember coming to my office that day I forgot a manuscript, and I asked you to bring it down after school? Do you remember the writer I was having a conference with, the one with the blue hair?”

  Did I ever. One of my mother’s authors. Oh God. I shrugged.

  “Mrs. Teitelbaum,” said my mother, “author of Cat Fancies, The Haunting of Desire, and Children of Neglect. That author. She knows every bargain in New York City, does Mrs. Teitelbaum, and she gets her hair cut by a very, very chic hairdresser at his own apartment for half the price he charges at the salon. Guess where he lives?”

  In Joel’s building, of course; where else?

  “She remembered me?” I blurted, giving it all away, but what the heck, my mom is a real terrier about something once she gets her teeth into it. There was no way out of this but right through it. I just hoped it would be quick and relatively painless because I really like my mom, and I wanted to get back to where we could giggle together over Mrs. Teitelbaum’s blue hair and her pretty blue fictional imagination, instead of doing this interrogation of yours truly myself over what Mrs. Teitelbaum had said she’d seen.

  “Children of Neglect,” my mother mused. “You never read that one, did you? Mrs. Teitelbaum’s one excursion into serious nonfiction. She loves kids. She never forgets a kid’s face. She didn’t phone me to report on you, by the way, but to ask a question about her royalty statement. Then she said something about this small world in which I too know the Wechslers, and was I aware that Carlotta Wechsler just loved Cat Fancies? I said, ‘What Wechslers?’ and she told me.”

  She was smiling. I smiled back.

  “Um, well, Mom, I met this boy,” I said, and stopped, not knowing where to go from there.

  My mom got this revolting, gooey look. “Oh, Tina, of course you did! You had to meet one someday, didn’t you? I just wish you hadn’t kept it a secret from me. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  We had a very long, heart-to-heart talk which I refuse to go into any more than is absolutely necessary. It was extremely embarrassing. First of all, even though it had been blood-curdlingly clear to both me and Lennie from pretty soon after we noticed each other that we were not destined to spend our lives together, we had done some kissing and exploring around together before giving up out of sheer embarrassment over the determination of Fate to mess us over whenever we were together. It wasn’t as if I was completely ignorant, aside from the explanations Mom had given me when I got my first period.

  Secondly, I didn’t have the feelings about Joel that my mother insisted on assuming I had, but here came all this carefully nondirective advice meant to keep me from getting in over my head with somebody I didn’t even like much. I just had to sit there squirming and take it as if it applied.

  She told me what Mrs. Teitelbaum had passed on to her: that Joel was a sweet boy although inclined to be moody and rather self-absorbed, and that he had stopped going to a special school for artistic kids when he’d quit studying the violin, to the shock of his parents, who continued to hope that he would return one day to the fold; and that it had worried Mrs. Teitelbaum that the poor boy had been robbed in the park, or so the doorman had told her, and was I all right or had I been involved too—along with the elderly gentleman who had accompanied us upstairs, some musical friend of the family’s, no doubt? Agent Teitelbaum had spotted Paavo too, of course.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s a retired musician who plays chamber music with Joel’s dad sometimes. Joel’s parents were both busy, so Joel went to him first about the mugging. It wasn’t serious, nobody got hurt.”

  We didn’t stay with Paavo or the mugging for long, though. The important part of this conversation was the lecture on men, which was what Mom concentrated on.

  I’d had this lecture before, and sitting through it again didn’t help my patience. I was feeling very jittery, wondering if Mom would end up doing something really weird and impossible, like trying to forbid me to see Joel again. You never knew with her. It could depend on how things were going between her and Mr. Editor.

  But she ended with, “I hope Joel treats you well, Tina, and I hope you maintain the standards of someone who respects herself and other people,” and so on. The usual. I’d been hearing it for a long time.

  I’d have liked to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, that Joel and I didn’t really hit it off too well, but there was no way to do that.

  Then she said, “Tomorrow, Tina, I’d like you home right away after school to do something special for me. I’d like you to stay here and see if the landlord sends anyone up here to rip off anything more of ours, all right?”

  She meant that I’d seen enough of Joel for a while and so I’d better get otherwise occupied. That’s how she was, blowing hot one minute and cold the next. It was really impossible.

  “Alone, Tina,” she said. “All right?”

  “What are you going to do, get the doorman to spy on me while I’m supposed to be spying on the landlord?” I said.

  So we had a fight after all, and the result was that I was told I absolutely had to come straight home from school the next day, or else. Or else what exactly was not spelled out. My mother preferred to work on the theory, I think, that a vague sort of threat was more effective than something specific that I could think about and weigh in the balance, so to speak.

  What she would have said about the Princes and Paavo I did not know, but I have to admit it crossed my mind to come out with all of it. I mean, she and I had lived together a long time, on our own and backing each other
up a lot in spite of certain differences. As I said, she was no fool. I was curious about what she would make of Paavo.

  She’d probably think he was an old mole-ster, that’s what. I kept my mouth shut. I felt mean and angry about the whole thing.

  Nobody was going to keep me out of the most important business in my life.

  I set my alarm and put it under my pillow, and it woke me at one A.M. I sneaked into the kitchen, shut the door, and phoned Joel in the dark, looking out the window into the air shaft where I used to hear Mr. Vishinsky’s music.

  I’d gotten the number from the phone in Joel’s living room, just in case, and I hoped that his family stayed up late, which I thought was pretty likely. My mom went out with a play director for a while, and he said all performers have weird hours because of doing their work in the evening and having to wind down afterwards. It’s funny, the useless pieces of information you can remember when they suddenly get useful.

  I had kind of liked the director, too, and the idea of the glamorous theater. But Mom had ditched him, or he had ditched her, so that was that.

  A woman with a hoarse voice answered the phone, Mrs. Rouse, probably.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really need to talk to Joel. He’s been tutoring me in math for a test, and I think I left some notes with him. I need him to bring them to school tomorrow. Could you wake him for me? It’s important.”

  One way or another, he got on the line. “Tina? What are you doing calling up so late?”

  I told him about my mom putting her oar in. One thing about Joel, he knew how to keep his mouth shut until you got finished.

  “Shit,” he muttered when I was all through.

  “Listen, it doesn’t have to make problems if we don’t let it,” I said, hoping I was right. “Here’s the thing, though: my doorman has to see me here tomorrow right after school, no taking time out at the planetarium park. Can you bring Paavo over here? No, not here exactly—upstairs, onto the roof. I'll open our windows. Ask him to play a little music into the air shaft. I’ll hear and I’ll come up and join you.”